If you’re a true marketing miser with a creative streak, you may want to try your hand at what we do.

Here’s a secret.  (Shhh!)

            You can.

Using the miserly marketing service gets you our experience in the total job of delivering web experiences and 360° marketing that engage fresh audiences and produce response.

Unlike most marketers, we have a no lock-in rule that says we never build sites that are hard or expensive for our clients to take on themselves as and when.

And if you want to do it from scratch yourself, that’s great too!

Go ahead! Experiment with your marketing.  Let us recommend to you some services we use to guarantee that our work is high standard without being high cost for our clients.

[This page, by the way, fails our tests for marketing effectiveness.  Far too wordy.  As it’s not selling you anything or inviting a response, it can stay!]

True DIY website designers use loads of specialist applications.  Marketing misers recognise that the copy (site text) is the heart of the site, and any and every trick that makes the process of site design, development and maintenance easy is a plus.

1&1 customers of even inexpensive packages enjoy a nifty little tool called Website Builder.  This provides a wide range of off-the-shelf site designs and performs a ‘content management’ function.  That jargon means that you can radically change the website design and the copy magically flows through to the new site.  No programming required.  Nothing to download.

When we use it, we usually custom develop key visuals rather than using the supplied imagery.  If you have graphical skills then you may find this straightforward.  Otherwise, choose sites that work with no key visual (this one is an example!) and use other imagery to fill the visual gap.

This site was developed and is maintained in the rather less good predecessor Website Creator.  It just goes to show - sometimes you don't need the latest to be the greatest :-)

Simple, professional, clean visuals do more than half the work of making a website appealing.  Less - and better - is definitely more in this respect.

Low cost stock photography is what you are looking for.  Some of the best photographers in the world sell the right to use great images for pocket money prices.  So being 100% honest is the right thing to do, and costs very little.  The same websites that host stock photography generally host other imagery as well.  You don't even need fancy photo editing software.

DON'T just grab stuff from image searches. Don't take chances with your image - and don't take liberties with other people's. A few pounds is all you'll usually have to pay for web rights on great, impactful images.

iStockphoto is the best kept secret of many a marketing department.  A vast wealth of imagery and good search facilities.

Although Dreamstime may be less well-known, it has some great exclusive artists, plus good topical coverage and quality control.

Sorry.  This bit of magic is something you just have to learn.  Or find a colleague (or friend, or relative) who has advertising experience.

Here's a tip to get you started. Write what you want to say. Then send it to a trusted friend or colleague with the instruction: get rid of half the sentences, and half the words in the sentences left over. And send the result of that to someone else for a final trim.

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a great way to test-market.  Daily control down of campaigns and cost is great, but be careful of spend more than you earn.  Two sites: which is better?  The one the MD likes best, or the one that gets more response?  Go figure.  

Also increasingly important in more markets than you realise is social media. Connecting with people out there on facebook, twitter and other spaces, and being smart about using email and instant messaging. There are lots of people claiming to be experts. Beware! At least until you've dipped a toe in yourself.

Here’s the secret.

Try something.  Track performance.  Interact with your audience.  Make changes. Compare results. Keep the changes that score better. 

Not rocket science, just hard work. But hard work that brings results.

Years ago, the great thing was to score highly in web searches, by working out how the search engines worked and engineering sites accordingly.  (Lots of the work was in providing great chunks of text designed never to be seen.) There were some heroes and some rogues.  But the lure of getting marketing done without paying for PPC was all about trying to defeat the search engines' desire to offer the results their users wanted.

In our experience, site optimisation services of that sort are only of use in very specific circumstances: we rarely use or recommend them.  In particular we find that the need to re-optimise after every significant change makes ‘optimisation’ another word for ‘fossilisation.’  And who wants to be a fossil?

So instead of old-style ‘site optimisation,’ we advocate ‘user optimisation.’  If a site is designed brilliantly from your potential customer’s point of view, the search engines will tend to find them and present them as appropriate. 

All of the above will cost you a few pounds, or a few tens of pounds if you ‘go large.’  Try it.  You may just get great results!

And don’t forget to come back here and say thank you.  We’d love to hear your story.

                                     © miserly.co.uk